Contact routing (i.e., work assignment decision-making in a contact center environment) is currently performed based on a comparison of agent skill to contact skill requirements. The agent skill is a single value (usually a scalar value ranging from 1 to 16) that represents a number of different factors including agent proficiency (often referred to as Key Performance Indicator (KPI) metrics, which can include First Call Resolution (FCR), CSS, $/call, $/min, Profit/call, Profit/min, Average Handle Time (AHT), Abandon Rate, closure rate, quality score, commit to pay rate, revenue/target, etc.), agent preference, and other subjective criteria.
Unfortunately, an agent's skill level is a grossly simplified representation of the agent's ability to actually handle a contact having certain processing requirements. Another unfortunate reality is that agent skill level is often subject to the opinions of their supervisors (which may or may not accurately reflect the agent's true ability to handle contacts of a certain type). The reason, however, that agent skill is used as the basis for making work assignment decisions is that if more detailed metrics (e.g., the actual KPI metrics) were used for making such decisions, the processing overhead would be enormous and contact centers would either be more expensive to implement or more difficult to maintain. In particular, routing based on actual KPI metrics would not be feasible in contact centers that employ traditional skill-based routing paradigms (e.g., skill-based queues).
In particular, prior art contact centers typically make routing decisions based on agent skill level (an abstraction of true agent capabilities). There is no currently-available contact center solution that allows real-time KPI metrics to be used for making routing decisions.
In addition to the above, the expense of manually administering a contact center is already substantially high. Especially for larger contact centers having thousands of agents and many skill levels, it is practically infeasible to manually administer skill changes (because there have been minor changes in KPI metrics) on a regular basis. Specifically, if a large contact center having 10,000 agents with each agent having multiple skills (e.g., 16) were tasked with changing only 1% of skills on a weekly basis (due to KPIs changing), there would have to be approximately 1600 manual skill changes every week. This is a primary reason why many large contact centers do not update skill levels for agents every time the agent's KPI changes slightly.